Dennis Robaugh: Baseball's really about all the moments in between

Friday

Sep 28, 2007 at 12:01 AMSep 28, 2007 at 8:00 AM

My baseball team made it to this year’s playoffs. My team is among the handful of storied Major League clubs to torment its fans with bleak stretches of futility and thrill them with hot streaks toward a pennant, only to break their hearts.

Dennis Robaugh

My baseball team made it to this year’s playoffs. My team is among the handful of storied Major League clubs to torment its fans with bleak stretches of futility and thrill them with hot streaks toward a pennant, only to break their hearts.

I will sit by the TV and watch these games, hang on every pitch and wish for a big hit with every crack of the bat.

I will cheer and curse.

Pressbox philosophers say baseball is a metaphor for life.

As I root for my team, our team, the Indians, to make it to the World Series, life indeed is what I’ll recall between every windup and swing.

I was just a tyke when my grandpa took me to my very first ballgame. I was so young, I’ve come by this memory only through stories my mom would tell. But my grandpa remembered that game until the day he died.

A few years later, my dad and I snuck into that ballpark, old Cleveland Municipal Stadium, plastic ball and bat in hand. Under a bright, sunny sky, surrounded by 80,000-some empty seats, we took a few swings and ran the bases. The infield dirt was so crisp, the grass so green, the pitcher’s mound almost mountainous. We were there for maybe 15 minutes, if that, until a security guard tossed us out.

Sometimes, when I go to games in Chicago, I’ll sneak a small jug of the tart brown hot-dog nectar into the park, at once an act of loyalty and defiance. Even the loathsome White Sox fans seated nearby will beg for a dollop. A game isn’t really a game, wherever you may be, without Stadium Mustard.

I scored a few tickets to a game in the Tribe's final season at old Municipal in 1993. I remember the roar of a packed ballpark, massive banana-shaped balloons rising from the crowd, echoes of revelry in the cavernous concourse and the scent of fireworks smoke. I don’t recall the game at all, not even who played, but I remember sharing that night with a pretty girl.

My team went to the playoffs in 1995 -- and the World Series, too, first trip since 1954. We were giddy with excitement. Some fans had lived a full lifetime before the ballclub got back. And some didn’t live long enough.

I watched those games with my dad by my hospital bedside as doctors pumped antibiotics and platelets into my veins in a bid to save my life. Visiting hours were long over on game nights, but the nurses let Dad stay. We watched our team take out the Boston Red Sox and said little about the medical mystery or the fears that brought us to this cold, sterile room for these glorious games.

Not until spring, after two more emergency hospital stays, the ALCS and the disappointment of a lost World Series behind us, would we learn a renegade spleen was sucking all the good cells from my bloodstream. A genius doctor, successful surgery and a new season brought us back to life.

When I come home to Cleveland and visit with Grandma, we talk baseball. She’s endured two dozen operations, a couple bouts with cancer and various other maladies and injuries over the years, but she still follows her team on radio, TV and in the paper.

No matter where I am this fall, when I sit down to watch the playoff series, I know she’ll be watching, too.

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